Bernie Marcus, the billionaire Home Depot founder and philanthropist who died yesterday at age 95, was in the process of giving away the majority of his fortune. But there’s a good lesson in one of his more-recent causes. In 2020, Marcus gave $20 million to launch RootOne, a program to send Jewish teenagers to Israel. He later put another $60 million into it.
The point of the program, according to Marcus: “We want young people stepping onto their college campuses with deep connections to Israel and strong Jewish identities.”
Marcus saw what Jewish students were up against and wanted them to feel a sense of pride and comfort with their Jewish faith before they entered the whirlwind of brainless anti-Zionist hostility on campus. Marcus had also given to organizations like Hillel International. The craziness of the past year has only reinforced the urgency of supporting Jews on campus.
His unapologetic Zionism was matched by his unapologetic advocacy of economic liberty and the free market. In 2019, he and grocery-chain billionaire John Catsimatidis cowrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that began, provocatively: “The two of us are quite rich. We have earned more money than we could have imagined and more than we can spend on ourselves, our children and grandchildren. These days getting rich off a profitable business is regarded as almost sinister. But we have nothing to apologize for, and we don’t think the government should have more of our profits.”
To be clear, he wrote, “We believe in a well-funded government, and we understand it is our duty to pay our fair share of taxes. And we do.”
Marcus’s parents were Russian Jewish immigrants and his dreams of becoming a doctor were dashed when was accepted to Harvard Medical School but couldn’t afford it. So he found other dreams—one of which was the concept that would become Home Depot. In 1978, he and business partner Arthur Blank teamed up with financier Ken Langone to make it a reality.
Marcus’s life story is an uncommon one, but it does carry a universal lesson: We could do with less apologizing for success—and no apologizing for Zionism.
